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Clinical Storytelling, Art and the Problems of Being: The Analyst's Necessary Vertigo

Author(s) : Jade McGleughlin

Reviews and Endorsements

Most analytic writing sucks the life out of its subject—not so this luminous book, which makes reading itself a psychoanalytic experience. Jade McGleughlin's lively collection of essays demands losing one's way, demonstrating that in risking sovereignty what's gained is true living. With a fierce heart and a queer intelligence, McGleughlin inducts us into powerful forms of practice. When standing in the spaces is not enough, she helps us find the courage to fall through them into a world and a way of seeing illuminated by the harrowing wonder and the beauty of sheer being.
McGleughlin's expansive intellectual reach bridges not only European and American psychoanalytic traditions but also social theory, philosophy, personal reflection, and art. Here is an analytic writer for the urgency of our moment, showing us how intensely personal landscapes are suffused with social import and how inhabiting vulnerability is the soul of good politics, vibrant practice, and embodied being.
Francisco Gonzalez, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California

Jade McGleughlin gives us a psychoanalytic book for our time, offering a new and impactful vision of psychoanalytic thinking and praxis. In the nexus of the ontological and the intersectional, the personal and the political, McGleughlin spells out a unique vision of psychoanalysis where the analyst's non-sovereignty and inevitable interpenetrative entanglements capture and transform absence, trauma and the negative in the reality of the non-represented and non-verbal.
Working "beyond countertransference", McGleughlin finds a space to work in the unknowable while knowing something. Old categories of sameness, difference, race and gender and nothing less than patient-and-analyst dissolve and reconfigure as McGleughlin transports us to her consulting room, her world and her art.
Unafraid to imbricate her personal life and struggles with utterly compelling, sometimes unsettling and always profound clinical stories, McGleughlin draws on her own art, transformational movies, novels, and photography, to create a unique bricolage of what it means to be a clinician in today's world.
Robert Grossmark, PhD, ABPP, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

McGleughlin's writing often begins with a jolt, rendering us dizzied and upended. When we get back on our feet, we realize that we've entered a unique psychic country, one where ontology meets a different kind of intersubjective core. The usual referents of an ontological analysis, playing and reverie don't always capture how far she has been able to go in experiencing and identifying with her patient's experience.
With a gift for moving back and forth between raw experience and theory, McGleughlin has found ways to have a creative experience of living something together with her patient and with us. Her art is in remaining curious, finding and refinding new elements of her patient and herself.
I locate McGleughlin's unique interest combining the social, relational, and ontological strands of psychoanalysis in her capacity to keep us moving inside experiences of reverie (the patient and analyst in her mind) and the actuality of patient and analyst as objects. Her writing captures the essence of psychoanalysis as something in private, in public, a rare gift that is on display in this highly creative and generous writing.
Steven Cooper, clinical professor of Psychiatry, Columbia University; supervising and training analyst, The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research

Delicate, stalwart, electrifying, and true, McGleughlin charges spaces so spare that psychoanalyst and patient inhabit them "in the negative," in a quiet that honors Otherness without superordination. McGleughlin insists that the analyst, as an implicated subject in the historically raced and gendered surround, must risk "necessary vertigo", a not-knowing that thoroughly destabilizes while it also contains. A politically savvy frame emerges from the negative harkening back respect without presumption. Notes on being accrue in often subtle, sometimes bold, and always meaningful gestures that have the precision of artist Agnes Martin's keenest brush strokes.
Stephen Hartman, PhD, joint editor-in-chief, Psycoanalytic Dialogues

Joining Jade McGleughlin in her tender, admittedly futile, and nevertheless relentless attempts to connect with the human essence, you will suddenly, incomprehensibly, find access to what was previously unimaginable. With McGleughlin you learn how to love the most silent and withdrawn souls, and find ways to keep yourself company through the heartbreak. Her paintings carry us through that which cannot be named. Weaving the deeply personal and its socio-political context, McGleughlin's is a feminist-queer project, paradoxically using language to break apart its structures of colonization. Use this book: linger with it, teach it—this book will change you.
Orna Guralnik, PsyD, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis; Couples Therapy, SHOWTIME

McGleughlin has produced a rare gem, an experimental psychoanalytic book, and illuminated the conventions that limit psychoanalytic practice. The capacious reach, artistry, and playing that builds this book opens onto considerations of that which is hard to speak: trauma, the negative, nonbeing, non-belonging, the ineffable. Go for the content, but stay for the play.
Ken Corbett, PhD, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis

This book, in a way that is novel and unsettling and deeply engaging, offers a number of radical new ideas for psychoanalytic work. Throughout her writing, McGleughlin makes a case for enigma, uncertainty, gaps in knowing and thinking and speaking for analyst, analysand and reader. Reading the book brings us into the practice she is theorizing; allowing uncertainty and silence, in ourselves, in the writing, and in the clinical encounters to work their way into minds and hearts. A book that enacts what it also teaches. A profound experience.
Adrienne Harris, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, The New School for Social Research